These examples demonstrate that diffusion variables provide dozens or possibly hundreds of meaningful coordinates that trace the space of bacterial metabolic strategies. Using a procedure proposed by Moon et al. [1]} we combined diffusion variables in a low-dimensional visualization of the strategy space (Fig. 3C; Fig. S1). This embedding recapitulates the result that phylogenetic relatedness offers only a coarse marker of predicted ecological similarity, corresponding to the appearance of representatives from multiple taxonomic classes in close proximity to one another in the metabolic niche space.
